He gained permission from his grandmother to remove his bed to
his own garret, and there, from the bedstead at which he no longer
kneeled, he would often rise at four in the morning, even when the
snow lay a foot thick on the skylight, kindle his lamp by means of a
tinder-box and a splinter of wood dipped in sulphur, and sitting
down in the keen cold, turn half a page of Addison into something as
near Ciceronian Latin as he could effect. This would take him from
an hour and a half to two hours, when he would tumble again into
bed, blue and stiff, and sleep till it was time to get up and go to
the morning school before breakfast. His health was excellent, else
it could never have stood such treatment.
CHAPTER III.
'THE END CROWNS ALL'.
His sole relaxation almost lay in the visit he paid every evening to
the soutar and his wife. Their home was a wretched place; but
notwithstanding the poverty in which they were now sunk, Robert soon
began to see a change, like the dawning of light, an alba, as the
Italians call the dawn, in the appearance of something white here
and there about the room. Robert's visits had set the poor woman
trying to make the place look decent. It soon became at least
clean, and there is a very real sense in which cleanliness is next
to godliness. If the people who want to do good among the poor
would give up patronizing them, would cease from trying to convert
them before they have gained the smallest personal influence with
them, would visit them as those who have just as good a right to be
here as they have, it would be all the better for both, perhaps
chiefly for themselves.
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